Contactual OnDemand Call Center Blog

The Agile Call Center <br> For Olympic athletes and call center agents, agility and flexibility score gold

Tweet  

  

  

  

 delicious  

  

If you watched any of the recent Winter Olympics in Vancouver, you saw athletes who adapted on the fly to courses and conditions that changed moment to moment.  

Downhill skiers faced slalom courses that were soggy during their first run and icy the second time down. Biathletes with a clear shot at their first target had their visibility hampered by fog at the next. Agility and flexibility were the orders of the day to take home medals of any kind.

If you manage a call center you may have experienced similar changes in weather, seasonality, and the vagaries of the free market. If you use call center software that resides in the cloud-a virtual call center-you'll adapt as quickly as any gold medal winner in Vancouver.

Virtual call centers give businesses the flexibility and agility they need to adjust to all sorts of changes:

• Is your business seasonal? A cloud-based contact center lets a florist flex up, adding more agents to handle the predictable surges they experience around Valentine's Day or Mother's Day. Gather your call agents and within hours you can bring them online, from your offices, from their home offices, from anywhere they can access a Web browser and a telephone.
• Is your business at the mercy of Mother Nature? If your sales team is in, say, South Florida, you can count on a hurricane coming down the pike virtually every year, threatening not just your property, but your ability to operate and service your customers. Business continuity is a breeze with a virtual call center; you can route calls to agents you stage anywhere the power is still up and running.
• Perhaps your market is national but your budget is local. A hosted call center lets you add agents in a different time zone than yours-without adding the expenses of a second facility to your budget.

With a cloud-based call center, your team can bring home a medal no matter what the competition or the weather sends your way.